1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, control method thereof, and non-transitory computer-readable medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, printing by a shared printer is popularly used in an office environment. The shared printer is a printer driver which is installed in a print server by an administrator and set to be shared. A user can access the print server from a client and select an arbitrary printer from a list of shared printers having the sharing setting in the print server. In response to this, the printer object of this shared printer is installed in the client to enable printing using this shared printer. The management authority of a shared printer in the print server is given to only the administrator, and the user can use the shared printer under the management. A technique regarding a shared printer is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-244321.
There is a print service of transferring a print instruction from a client to a server, and converting a content to be to be printed into print data by the server which has received the print instruction. Recently, cloud computing is receiving attention as one form of providing a service from a server to a client. The main feature of cloud computing is to distribute and execute data conversion and data processing by using many computing resources, and simultaneously process requests from many clients. At present, a vendor who provides various print services by installing Web services on a cloud computing environment which implements cloud computing is making an appearance.
For example, Google® has released an interface which allows a printer to perform data communication with a cloud computing environment. By installing this interface in a printer, a user can designate the printer from a client to print even when the printer is connected to a server via the Internet.
When a plurality of users use one service printer from a print service as in an office environment, a sharing function provided by the print service is used. First, one user (printer administrator) registers a service printer in the print service. The printer administrator determines whether to permit another user to use the service printer, and makes “sharing setting” in the print job queue of the service printer for the account of a user permitted to use the service printer. When the user having the sharing setting logs in to the print service, he instructs whether to permit “sharing registration” of service printers having the sharing setting. If “sharing registration” is permitted, sharing registration is performed for all service printers having the sharing setting. The print job queue of the service printer of the printer administrator and the account of the user having the sharing setting (to be simply referred to as a sharing user hereinafter) are linked. As a result, the sharing user can transfer a print job to the print job queue.
The following problems arise when the above-described print service is introduced into an office environment, operated, and used. The first problem is that, when the printer administrator makes the sharing setting of a service printer for a user, work of determining a user account for which the sharing setting of each service printer should be made, and then making the sharing setting is complicated and puts a heavy burden. The second problem is that a user cannot perform sharing registration at an arbitrary timing for only an arbitrary service printer among service printers having the sharing setting.